Circular Coffee Break for Leaders, Innovators, and Practitioners
Sep 23, 2026 · 36 min · 14 segments
Energy efficiency in buildings is often framed as a cost, but what if it could be the most profitable decision a business makes? In this episode of Circular Coffee Break, Michael speaks with Nikolas…
Michael HanfHost
Now, you emphasize profitability, economic outcomes in the energy efficiency category.
Why is that so important from your point of view, from your experience, and how do you measure that translation from energy efficiency measures into concrete economic profitability-related outcomes?
It is important because in the European Union we want sustainability, but nobody wants to pay for it.
If sustainability can be profitable, if it is actually not a cost, but a new, better business to do it, then there are many people who want to do it.
And that has been the philosophy already from the start to make it profitable because otherwise these buildings will never turn green.
Do you have a concrete project that you could walk us through that basically delivered these results?
Very typical projects in Finland are, for instance, residential apartment buildings that nowadays the owners, well, actually everybody wants them to be energy class A.
Well, that is expensive if you just do it by force, like using a lot of money.
You can get any building to become energy class A, but it's very expensive.
So quite often for these construction companies, we are finding ways to make that specific building expensive.
And for residential apartment buildings, it's pretty often somewhere around 100,000 euros that we save in construction cost while making the buildings energy class A.
For other types of buildings like logistics centers, the big buildings are bigger.
So we have projects where we have saved almost 500,000 euros in construction costs for logistics, logistic hubs, and also office buildings.
Where do the biggest savings come from? Where is the biggest lever from your experience?
Often, probably because of the marketing of different product manufacturers people tend to think that the most energy efficient like energy efficiency is one product a heat pump or like one specific panels on the roof or something like that yeah you can get energy efficiency by doing those things but it's not very profitable and The biggest lever comes from combining often somewhere around 20 different things, which are in themselves very small.
But when you add them up to one big combination in that specific building, that is where you really get...
Now, you emphasize profitability, economic outcomes in the energy efficiency category.
Why is that so important from your point of view, from your experience, and how do you measure that translation from energy efficiency measures into concrete economic profitability-related outcomes?
It is important because in the European Union we want sustainability, but nobody wants to pay for it.
If sustainability can be profitable, if it is actually not a cost, but a new, better business to do it, then there are many people who want to do it.
And that has been the philosophy already from the start to make it profitable because otherwise these buildings will never turn green.
Do you have a concrete project that you could walk us through that basically delivered these results?
Very typical projects in Finland are, for instance, residential apartment buildings that nowadays the owners, well, actually everybody wants them to be energy class A.
Well, that is expensive if you just do it by force, like using a lot of money.
You can get any building to become energy class A, but it's very expensive.
So quite often for these construction companies, we are finding ways to make that specific building expensive.
And for residential apartment buildings, it's pretty often somewhere around 100,000 euros that we save in construction cost while making the buildings energy class A.
For other types of buildings like logistics centers, the big buildings are bigger.
So we have projects where we have saved almost 500,000 euros in construction costs for logistics, logistic hubs, and also office buildings.
Where do the biggest savings come from? Where is the biggest lever from your experience?
Often, probably because of the marketing of different product manufacturers people tend to think that the most energy efficient like energy efficiency is one product a heat pump or like one specific panels on the roof or something like that yeah you can get energy efficiency by doing those things but it's not very profitable and The biggest lever comes from combining often somewhere around 20 different things, which are in themselves very small.
But when you add them up to one big combination in that specific building, that is where you really get...
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